There’s a strange idea circulating among Mexican currency traders. Well, more of a joke really. But there’s a certain logic to it.

It goes like this: Instead of spending its precious reserves to defend the peso, Mexico should just buy Twitter Inc. — at a cost of about $12 billion — and immediately shut it down. The notion made the rounds this week after the central bank revealed it had already blown through $2 billion of reserves in a largely futile effort to shield the peso from a steady stream of anti-Mexico Tweets from Donald Trump.

“I would suggest they do it fast,” joked Juan Carlos Alderete, a foreign-exchange strategist at Banorte-Ixe in Mexico City. “Because we can barely afford it now."

Now, no one thinks this is really going to happen. And it’s hard to imagine it’d be effective anyway. But that the idea was even raised in jest shows how just how frustrated Mexicans are that their economy and the value of their savings are at the mercy of the seemingly random musings coming in 140-character bursts from Trump’s Twitter account. It’s a sentiment that presumably would be shared by U.S. investors in companies like, say, General Motors Co. or Lockheed Martin Corp., but in Mexico, the pain, and the accompanying despair, appear to be on a much greater scale.

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